My heart.
Hmmmm.....
As a quick browse through these blog archives will show, I used to be quite the blogger. Before blog days, I was quite the emailer. A quick stop on my Facebook page will show that I am still quite the Facebooker. I love to chronicle stories, moments, share ideas, post photos. I wanted to share the adventures I am having with others, and spark lively debate and celebrate a general joie d'vivre.
But for some time now, as my mind and spirit have quietened down from the whirlwind of an international move a few months back, as I've settled into just one job (a heckuvan all-consuming job at that, but just one job) for the first time in five years, I have felt a voice in my heart stirring. The reflective writer in me is awakening.
She has been buried in busyness for so long. Ten years ago I moved to Chicago for grad school, to hone my craft as a features writer. I spent 2004-2007 writing several long newspaper pieces each week, not to mention editing an online thinking Christian's magazine at the same time. I had little energy for creative or personal writing. Then I moved to England in autumn 2007. My freelance journalism work paid the bills for the first few years, as I immersed myself in a new community, in British life and in exploring a new calling. Even in the three years that followed: through jobs as a an intern pastor, as a debt counselor and finance assistant, through engagement and early married life and finally a stint doing communications at a missions agency, I was writing. I was writing for work, I was writing articles on the side to help pay the student loans, I was editing dissertations and job applications for graduate students. Between the writing work, the professional work and the purely relational work of life, my creative well was exhausted. I laughed at the mere thought of blogging again.
Now, though. Now. Well....
Now I am sitting with my fingers on these keys, feeling peace descend. There is writing energy in me once more, a desire to put words to paper (so to speak), to create life with them. As my 15-year-old self wrote in a poem that made it into several juvenile publications: "I am a friend of words, and I glimpse them in their secret moments."
What does that mean, I wonder? Did 15-year-old Stephanie even know what that line meant when she crafted it? I think she was trying to describe the mystery of words, to spy on that moment when a string of symbols suddenly sparks and bursts into flame with meaning. Did she consider the craft of writing back then, as I do now, as akin to Frankenstein? He is leaning over his monster in a dark basement as the lightning crackles, shouting, "Life! I have created life!!!" and the monster flexes into being. All I know is that she - the she that became me - sensed that something special happens when a writer creates something out of nothing.
And this is what I hope to do now. For the first time in about a decade, I am not going to write something with the aim of writing to an audience, or entertaining, or informing or even chronicling. I simply want to use words to convey what is in my heart. Is that egotistical? I suppose it is, but nobody has to read it. Nobody except my dear friend Shanel, the last person to comment on the previous incarnation of this blog, the one whose comment, rediscovered a few months back, really got me thinking and has helped me to realize that I'm ready to go deeper. I've shared about my adventures. Now I'll attempt to share my heart.
